Shedding her skin

To say that Melissa Etheridge’s new CD, Skin, gets off to a provocative start with the song “Lover, Please” would be a major understatement. She puts an advance copy of the CD on her stereo, and her voice fills the room: “A shot in the dark / I woke up to find / You had broke all the rules / And you changed your mind / Didn’t I love you good? / Didn’t I love you right? / And where are you goin’ / dressed to kill tonight? / Oh, this is going to hurt like hell.”

Etheridge lowers the volume, retrieves her visitor’s jaw from the floor, then laughs the way you do when you fear you may have revealed too much. “This CD is where my personal and professional lives have truly collided,” reveals the singer, reclining on the sofa in the living room of the home she moved into in November, in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles. “All my work is autobiographical, but this is right out of the headlines. It’s so clear and so…ouch!”

“Ouch” is right, for the headlines she’s referring to, of course, are the ones from October, which announced that she and her partner, filmmaker Julie Cypher, were splitting up after 12 years. The news, coming hot on the heels of the Ellen-Anne breakup, sent ripples of shock and sadness through the gay populace. After all, we had just seen them on the cover of Rolling Stone, beaming like girls in love, as they told the world that the biological father of their two children, Bailey, 4, and Beckett, 2, was in fact rocker David Crosby, a friend of theirs. What happened?

This is the first interview Etheridge has granted since the breakup—and, boy, is there a lot to cover. In addition to the changes in her personal life and living situation (Cypher resides in a house just across the back alley), there’s her ongoing gig as the host of Lifetime’s Beyond Chance and a book of lyrics and extremely personal reminiscences called The Truth Is…, coming out on July 12, the same day as Skin.

But what we really want to know is, How is she doing? Is the woman whose songs and activism have kept us fired up for over a decade going to be OK? “In the last year, I’ve learned that what doesn’t kill you doesn’t kill you,” the jeans and T-shirt-clad rocker says with a laugh, “and that I’m stronger than I thought and that I have more power than I thought.”

Etheridge cranks up the volume—in time to hear herself scream “Oh, God!” backward on the CD’s emotionally raw fifth track, “It’s Only Me”—then smiles. “And I like myself more than I ever have.”

The Advocate:Why did you name your new CD Skin?
Melissa Etheridge: Because there’s like three or four references to getting out of my skin and getting back in.

So how naked are you on the cover?
[Laughs] I took some pictures that showed my shoulders and the new tattoo on the back of my neck that says "skin" in white ink.

Did it hurt?
It hurt in that kind of good way, and at the end, the guy put his hand on my shoulder and he said, “Congratulations, now you’re one of us.” It was a cool feeling, because I’d been so used to “I’m gay and that’s what I am.”

And you can’t be anything else.
Right, and he and I could not be more different.

This morning I spoke with David Cole, the coproducer-engineer on Skin. He said to tell you he was up till 3 a.m. remixing your single.
[Laughs] David saved my life. You gotta believe in the universe of fate or whatever. [Last] summer, when I felt like things were going to have to change between Julie and I, at first I was like, “No, no, no.” We were trying everything possible that you do to try to salvage a relationship in the end. Then in September we decided to split. Well, I’d had these plans to do a one-woman show and a book about my lyrics, and I just said, “Stop everything,” and—like when I was a teenager in Leavenworth, Kan.—I went into the basement and wrote songs.

So I closed all my doors and I wrote songs. I had no plans to make a record, but in two weeks I had 10 songs, so I called my manager and said, “I want to be in the studio Monday—find me an engineer-producer who’s a nice guy, because I’m going to be very vulnerable.” David was the only one I met. I looked in his eyes and I went “Yeah.” He helped me through that whole period. He was there the day we had to tell everyone we were breaking up because The Star somehow found out.

How do you find out that the tabloids are going to run something?
They call you and say, “This is going to run in two days. Do you have any comment?”

What does it feel to get a call like that?
It’s horrible. They must listen to cell phone conversations, because they knew about us buying two houses. So in one night we had to call everyone we knew who didn’t know we were breaking up, which was mostly everybody.

Did you leave messages for the people who weren’t home?
Uh-huh. Only our closest friends knew, so we had to call my family, her family. It was really awful.

And you were in the studio during that time?
Yes. I remember that feeling of Well, today people are opening their newspapers and reading about me…and my failure. That’s how I felt. I remember playing the music, and it was so healing, this safe place I could go to when all this crap was going down. I don’t care if anyone buys this record. It’s served its purpose.

Do you ever have a lyric come into your head and think, This is exactly what I’m feeling, but it’s not fair to the other people involved to put it out there?
Oh, no. No, no, no, no. I have complete artistic license. I’ve always believed that.

Has that ever caused problems?
Oh, yeah. Julie’s been like, “Don’t tell people that!” But it’s my job. It’s my art. I’m sorry, it’s part of the deal.

If Eminem can do it…
So can I! At least I’m not locking you in a trunk.

Has Julie heard the new album yet?
Yeah. She hasn’t said what she thinks about it.

When you made the announcement you were breaking up, did you feel like you were letting people down who had looked to you as role models? Like, “First, Ellen and Anne, and now us?”
Yeah. I remember when we found out about Ellen and Anne, we were arguing at the time. We were yelling at each other.

That’s a perfect scene for the TV movie.
[Laughs] It was crazy. Ellen called, and we stopped in the middle of our argument and talked to her about how Anne was roaming around. This was before we heard it on the news. It was just a wickedly strange moment.

I don’t live my life to be a role model. I realize that being open about my relationship has put me in that position, but I’m not going to not break up because I’m a role model. I did see the waves that it sent through the [gay] community, and it was sad. But I believe, as people see how we’re dealing with our family, that anything that they had believed about us is still there. We’re still those people. We live, grow, change. Unfortunately.

Do you have a sense of what couldn’t be solved?
Ask me in a year and I might be able to narrow it down to a sound bite. I’m still in the middle of it. I’m still struggling with why one person can’t—what are the things that won’t allow them to push through obstacles and keep going…I don’t know. I don’t know.

What reactions from people have surprised you?
I thought that maybe it would be that thing where you lose friends in a divorce, but our friends have done really well. Because it’s not a nasty, ugly thing with Julie and I, they’ve been able to maintain both friendships. It’s new for me because Julie always kept the social thing together, so it’s been a real lesson for me. Now I actually have to pick up the phone and go, “Um, you want to do somethin’?”

Now, the Rolling Stone cover that called you “The New American Family” came out in January of last year. Looking back, do you feel strange about the timing of that?
Yeah. When I went out to promote my last CD, Breakdown, all that anybody wanted to talk about was, “Who’s the father?” I started feeling very uncomfortable because it was this big, huge secret that had all this power.

It was like being in the closet again.
Right, and so much energy went into saying, “No, no, no, no.” So Julie and I were doing OK at the time, and we both agreed that if it ever did come out, that it would cause something that we didn’t want our children to be subject to that any older in their life. So we were like, “Let’s just put this out there while they’re young,” which is exactly what we did. Then as the months went by, I was like, “Oh, fuck, this is coming apart, and that definitely sucks.” But it was done, and the story of who the father is was a lot bigger than I thought it would be. It was crazy. I think that I really realized the scope of the whole thing when Billy Crystal made a reference to it at the Oscars. When they showed Annette Bening, he said, “I hope it doesn’t look like David Crosby.” It was strange because it came from such a private, friend-to-friend thing.

Have you ever thought of recording with David?
We talk about it, but this wasn’t the appropriate album to work with him on.